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Painting life splutters along- I've finally grasped the nettle and got in a selection of oils, so this is their first outing. No dicking about with the dickie birds on this one- tried hard to keep them simple and toned down, concentrate on buffalo attitude and the super hooked shadow thrown by the high sun.

Aha! But I see that you have snuck in some dickie birds after all!
You look quite comfortable with oils. And there's a nice sense of mass to the buffalo. It's interesting to see how you work with heftier, literally, subjects.

Just dropping in to confirm continued life- here's some Curlew Sands from earlier in the month, under plain clothes escort from G Plovers. I kinda liked the more harmonious colour in the underpainting, whereas the finished version is a bit literal in colour: water is blue, weed is green, birds are fieldguide colours. Onward!

Just dropping in to confirm continued life- here's some Curlew Sands from earlier in the month, under plain clothes escort from G Plovers.

Well said, and painted! It seems you may have noticed on some of these the same thing I've noticed on Killdeer, a horizontal line so sharp from lower wing edge to tail that it looks like the handle of a frying pan. I always think you could lift Killdeer up by their tail and they'd stay in exactly the same pose, that horizontal not budging a bit.

Hello all- sorry for absence from thread. Very best wishes for the year ahead and thanks for such kind and encouraging comments over 2013.

It's been a year of learning: that much as I love the splashy watercolours/thick oils/brave abstractions of my heroes, I'm better off with something a bit more gradually built-up and reversible when it goes wrong. But not too careful or detailed of course…that's definitely the province of others.

So for now the way forward seems to be thinned oil on top of a bit of cheerful underpainting. Here's couple of recents. Onward!

Oh Ed how inspiring!! and how lucky I've been to see the steps in the journe y that culminates in these two wonderful paintings. You''ve been on a teter totter between the abstract and the representational and now you are perfectly balanced between the two.....HAPPY NEW YEAR, and so looking forward to what you do next.

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